Kitty Kraus

Untitled

Kitty Kraus, Untitled, 2008. Installation.

This work emphasises Kitty Kraus’s involvement with process, with alchemical transformations associated with Post-Minimalist aesthetics, Arte Povera, Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson. The loss of form or its dissolution is at the heart of the series of lamps encapsulated in blocs of ice with liquid progressively spreading on the floor. The bulb is embedded in the ice. The cubic form is compact, minimal and resembles an explosive device. Once the lamp is switched on, the ice melts inevitably. The color black spreads on the floor to form an abstract landscape. It is as if we are confronted with a common mechanical accident but the realization has a very precise protocol. She makes wooden boxes with silicone which are filled with water that enables the moulding of the form. Electric lights are often present in works of the second half of the 20th century to refer to daily objects (Rauschenberg, the Nouveaux Réalistes) or to transcendental aspirations (Dan Flavin, Mario Merz). Here we are faced with a sombre beauty that destroys the object, the form and metaphysical aspirations while creating a changing form that is close to black dripping covering the ground.

Kitty Krauss has a very particular outlook on Minimal and Constructivist Art. She reinterprets certain historical forms by highlighting their sensitive dimension. She uses glass, ice, light, mirrors in works that toy with the tension between formal perfection and extreme fragility. References can be found to sculptures by Richard Serra but also by Joseph Beuys or Dan Flavin. She questions the Modernist myths, the aesthetic preconceptions of the art of the 1960s. The materials she uses are intentionally chosen to evoke the fragility and impermanence of things. Kitty Krauss was born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1976. She lives and works in Berlin.